communicating with parents is like - making sausages?

I took a shot at illustrating my take on the saying, "Laws are like sausages: It's best not to see them being made."

For me this is most apropos in the situation of trying to say something to my mom: When you say something to a parental unit, what goes in bears little resemblance to what she hears. Apparently.

You put something in one ear; it churns through what passes for the parental 'thought' process like so: The base mix of chopped preconceptions is sprinkled with doubt and seasoned with a dollop of selective listening; the result is cooked in the fire of parental certainty ("My way or the highway") and squeezed into an intestine-like and equally constraining tube of parental bias.

The drawings aren't as funny as I'd like. WAH! But I like to draw, so we'll see if I can find something I think I *am* good at (with the drawing, that is.)

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The ideal outcome of an attempted communication is something like this:



This is where what you've attempted to express and what is understood by the other person are pretty much the same thing.

Then there's the case where *most* of the communication gets through, but the other person sees things from a slightly different angle, which is pretty normal. Not a big deal.



Then we get to selective listening:



And finally, there's THIS kind of 'communication':



It reminds me of a game called 'telephone' that we used to play in school when I was a kid, where the kids would all sit in a circle, and one person would whisper a sentence to the person next to her. Whatever the sentence was, it was supposed to get repeated all the way around the circle, one person to the next, til it got to the last person, who then said the sentence out loud.

Invariably, no matter how simple it was, the sentence would become scrambled beyond all recognition. "My grandma wears purple hats" would morph to "My aunt's dog eats underpants" or some equally HILARIOUS transformation. (Usually there were at least 10 or 15 kids in the circle, which would add to the craziness. The fact that they're kids, the complexity of the sentence, the number of people must all be factors - but I used to use that game to illustrate to co-workers and colleagues how hard it can be to achieve clear, precise communication.



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These drawings are making me a little sad - they looked so great when I was working on them, but in the final edition they just look kind of boring. Too much focus on small details that get lost at any distance. Seems that 'big picture' thinking may be more effective for this kind of thing?

And can you even TELL that the yellow thing in the first frame is supposed to be a banana? Argh. I'm TRYING not to try so hard, I really am. I'm TRYING not to think so much.

Fuck it. Too many rules. I yam what I yam. (Can I draw a picture of Popeye that looks sort of like me?)

Maybe I'll try posting a detailed bit, to see how it looks:

Hm. It still loses some definition, and what are those brown specks on the bottoms of his FEET??? Are Banana Man's feet rotten? Blech. More to learn. [Edit: I think I just need to draw the really detailed stuff BIGGER. More room for error that way, plus then when you shrink it down to blog size it doesn't look so pixelated.]

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"I used to be indecisive...but now I'm just not sure."